Curiosity is a stiletto, needle-point, both edges razor sharp, lethal in the wrong hands, yet also a stimulating path to discovery — just one more double-edged sword from which I have never cowered. In fact, I slide it under my belt to tickle my grandsons’ fancy, maybe even that of their children if ever so fortunate. Stifle a child’s curiosity and you ought to be charged with abuse. At least, that’s my view, televangelist, Sunday School teacher and chief of police be damned.

What’s got me thinking this week is the lawn, a rare three weeks without mowing. Having performed the chore for nearly 50 years in this fertile valley, I know it has never before happened in my lifetime. So, of course, my wheels are spinning to a shrill, piercing scream, on my walks, in my rambles, when random thoughts distract even the most gripping reads.

Yeah, I know, I can feel readers’ angst already: “Uh-oh,” they’re pondering, “where’s he going with this?” And I suppose there are a many turns I could take on a subject like curiosity, starting with that threadbare axiom about the cat and the pleasant outcome that brought about its reincarnation. But, no, far too familiar. What’s bugging me as I sit here today, contemplating a drought interrupted by our first puddles in weeks, followed by inspiring Wednesday-morning air, is the reading of Bill McKibben’s troubling “Rolling Stone” magazine piece titled “The Reckoning,” on global warming. When will people finally “get it” and expel the diabolical, manipulative deniers from our political landscape? I’m not optimistic it’ll happen anytime soon.

According to McKibben, for many years the lonely canary in a rickety, old, backwoods coal mine posted “No Trespassing,” it may already be too late. He lays out some simple, defeatist math concerning U.S. fossil fuels already in storage for intended use. He says if it’s all used, we’re freakin’ cooked, literally. So stop at the newsstand and pick up a copy, fresh cougar bait on the cover, it’ll tell you all you need to know and plenty you’d probably rather not know about the state we’re in, thanks to greedy energy companies and the clever wordsmiths and unethical scientists they employ to mislead the clueless flock. It’s criminal. If you want more, go to 350.org and sign up for email alerts, just so that the crisis threatening the world as we know it stays in plain view. A scholar from the beautiful Champlain Valley college town of Middlebury, Vt. — where I found myself sitting on the common Sunday afternoon — McKibben is from the neighborhood and well worth heeding.

Problem is that McKibben does most of his preaching to the choir, can’t seem to reach lazy mainstream-news hounds who continue to get their daily fix about the coast-to-coast drought ravaging our land, the related wildfires scorching the parched West, without even a faint whiff of the crucial question hovering over the whole crisis: Why? Gee, do you suppose it could have anything to do with the millions of gallons of oil sludge circulating along the deep, dark ocean floor somewhere in the Atlantic following the disastrous 2010 BP Gulf spill? How about Fukushima? Could the poisonous radiation belched into to the atmosphere and puked into the ocean be even partially to blame for this record heat and drought? Sadly, if you’re looking for a culpability analysis, you won’t find it on the nightly news or morning paper. No sir. If it’s the truth you seek, you must search alternative sources, be they cutting-edge blogs or other online news sources, or secondary publications like “Mother Jones,” “The Nation,” “Rolling Stone” or “Orion,” that literary gem few know of. If you can believe it, even Al Jazeera covered the Gulf spill and Fukushima back in the day better than Associated Press, and it’s not like Arabs have no energy interests to protect.

It reminds me of the old days, before the Internet and 24/7 cable news stations, when you had to read “Ramparts” or I.F. Stone or, again, “Rolling Stone,” if you wanted to know what was going on in Vietnam, at Kent State or on the city streets of San Francisco, LA and Chicago. It’s the same, tired old story today, with the courts, the cops and the mainstream press fighting hard to protect the status quo while lonely, altruistic voices like McKibben sound Paul Revere’s alarm to deaf ears of loyalist “sheeple” waving their flags made in Taiwan, singing praise of “true patriots” like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hanitty, prime-time gasbags for the Rupert Murdoch/Roger Ailes propaganda machine. Yes indeed, history repeats itself and will likely continue doing so until it all comes to a hot, fiery grand finale, by which time it’ll be pointless even to say, “I told you so.”

Which I guess brings us right back where we started, to the concept of basic human curiosity. Those who are curious today can find answers easier than back in the Sixties and early Seventies. Problem is that intellectual and philosophical curiosity have been suffocated in debt, which leaves middle-class college graduates with no freedom to explore or travel or figure out precisely who they are before settling down to own a home, raise a family and punch the clock; better still, blast away with an assault rifle at a movie theater. There’s just no time for floating and free thinking these days, only immense pressure to quickly plug into a “good job,” which these days translates to one that pays well, not necessarily makes you happy. What we end up with is a flock of expressionless automatons, what Orwell and Upton Sinclair and many others called wage slaves, even if some of the jobs do bring a livable wage and financial security, albeit for a job you either hate or, to perform it, must hang your conscience on the hallway coat rack.

No matter what McKibben and others of his honorable ilk say, I sense I’m going to miss the day of reckoning. Yeah, I know the salmon and the Pocumtucks have already vanished, and soon Franklin County sugarbush will follow the same tragic path. I truly believe I will live to see the day when the nostalgic sight of steaming springtime sugar shacks will require a drive north. It’s an image that makes me think of my grandsons. I’m convinced they’ll taste global-warming horror. For that I feel diluted guilt and a pure rage, because we could have prevented it with curiosity, activism and rejection of capitalist greed that benefits few and leaves the rest of us sucking filthy wind the press assures us meets acceptable government health standards, whatever that means.

All I know is that Mother Earth has taken ill, greed’s to blame and the culprits would fight another civil war to prevent change. Activists tried to foster change in the Sixties, got squashed and are now following our salmon and indigenous tribesmen to a lonely place called Oblivion. Just bang a hard right at the four-corners to Doom, and drill, Baby, drill.

With news flying at me last week like black flies in a sticky Maine bog, I never got to a subject I wanted to discuss but figured I’d get to it this week. So, here it is: the subject of deer jumping to their deaths one by one off highway overpasses in deadly chain reactions. Who would have ever guessed that the little tidbit I put in this space a few weeks ago, just a simple tease to smoke out information that was for some reason impossible to pry from the authorities, would grow such sturdy legs? I can’t say I’m disappointed.

Anyway, soon after that quick mention of possibly two deer catapulting to their death off the Route 2 overpass spanning Interstate 91 in north Greenfield around daybreak June 17, I received an email from an old friend and UMass professor who preferred to remain anonymous. A PioneerValleytransplant from westernMaryland, where many family members remain, the man recalled “nearly 10 bucks leaping to their deaths near Flintstone, Md., on Interstate 68 one summer evening several years ago.” He had unsuccessfully Googled the story before sending me a link to theCumberlandTimes-News and suggesting I call there. Someone would remember the incident that had received extensive press coverage. Well, I followed the link, found the name of Managing Editor Jan Alderton, gave him a jingle and spoke to him at his midmorning desk. Although he couldn’t remember the incident, he knew just the man who would, veteran Outdoor Editor Mike Sawyers, and patched a call through to his extension. Sawyers picked up on the second ring and instantly remembered the carnage, which wasn’t recent. He guessed it occurred 10 or more years ago and, he thought, involved six bucks in velvet jumping one by one to their deaths, leaving a messy scene on the pavement below.

“Do a YouTube search on ‘deer jumping off bridges’,” Sawyers suggested. “I don’t think there’s anything on that particular incident but such deer events are not unusual. I remember someone sending me a YouTube link years ago.”

I took his advice and, sure enough, many videos, some with sinister laughter in the background as deer leap bridge railings to their death. Myself, I can handle such visuals and accept them as tragic reality, but I can’t say I find any humor in watching animals take death leaps.

Back to my original UMass professor source, he grew up on a dairy farm and surmised deer were predisposed to a follow-the-leader mentality common among hoofed farm animals. “I guess most people were astonished that those deer would follow one after another over the railing but I suspect it may be similar to other hoofed-animal behavior,” he wrote. “For instance, cow behavior. The old farm boy in us told us to identify the lead cow, get her to go somewhere and the rest of the herd would follow. This is the ‘lead-cow concept’ that leads a herd in a specific direction, and in this case, a lead deer leading the rest (on a fatal, panicked decision). Pretty amazing but it happens.”

Yes indeed. And apparently it happened right here inGreenfield, although the state police weren’t about to confirm it or provide further details to the scribes who tried to follow up on the initial June 17 police report. I’d love to know why. Sounds more like a power trip than anything else.

I blame secretive presidential candidate Willard “Mitt” Romney, who is now under fire for withholding income-tax returns from his days at Bain Capital. As governor, Romney instituted silence fromBayStateemployees by forbidding any press interaction without prior approval from a third-party screening agency. Now, even the most benign news must pass through these channels, stifling investigative journalism by tipping off the targets of probes and eliminating surprise bombshells. Such potentially damaging stories are these days softened by government spokespeople who flood the press with damage-control releases before the story “gets away from them.” In the old days, the harmful story broke, then the damage-control tried to play catch-up. There’s less and less of that these days, thus old news and declining readership. It’s a death knell for newspapers that wait for press releases, the same ones sent elsewhere the same day and “broken” by local television and radio stations before hitting the street in print.

I knew before pulling out my desk chair Wednesday morning that it was dangerous. I could sense it. Why had I picked up that morning phone call, breathed that refreshing air on my walk, watched Chubby freewheel like I once did many years ago, just the thought of it spinning my wheels into another realm? Problem is, back when I could run, I didn’t know where to go. Now I know where to go and can’t get there. Oh well. Such is life. No complaints.

First the phone call, old friend, faraway, separated by two or three time zones. The man was a ballplayer in his day, not one of these delusional wannabes still trying to prove prowess. It was early morning from my friend’s location so I knew it had to be something important but wasn’t expecting this. A family man who never “wandered” to my knowledge, he was true blue for nearly 40 years of marriage to his high school sweetheart. Then, out of a clear blue sky with thin white clouds of no ill intent, it just happened, akin to an airborne seed that falls on a perfect spot and immediately flourishes. Yes, an attraction took root and now my buddy’s feeling quite guilty while dreading the inevitable “chat” with his soon-to-be betrayed partner, a guilt softened by emotional euphoria like no other. Why he called me I do not know. I hadn’t spoken to him in years, maybe 10, but we were tight in our day, still are it seems. He probably knew I was cut from a different cloth and seldom choose to follow conventional paths or direct others toward them.

We spoke an hour. I assured him that I would still be his friend when others rejected him as a selfish louse, her as a heartless home-breaker. I don’t view such affairs through the preacher’s lens. I say if the wind deposits you in utopia and you know it was meant to be, go with your heart, your soul and Nature’s will — Chamber of Commerce, PTA and Ecumenical Council be damned. Of course, that’s just me, the adaptive pantheist and contrarian. But enough of that. Newspapers can, you know, be quite uncomfortable with such blasphemous chit-chat, stuff that stirs the ire of priests, judges, school committees, and chiefs of police, self-appointed guardians, all, of freedom and justice. Trust me, I’ll have my say, am working on ebbs and flows, development of characters and dialogue. Never easy, it’s been under way for some time now, through inspiring spurts and annoying clogs. I warned my wife that it could be the end of my marriage and my job, hey maybe even a lawsuit to complete the Triple Crown. Nothing worthy of arrest, although you never know in today’s America, where they seem to find a way to put a man behind bars if they want to. My wife has promised her support. She’s stuck by me this far. Why change?

Enough! Back to vanilla Trail fodder, the stuff average readers supposedly prefer — benign subjects, easy targets, no controversy to draw irate calls or letters to the editor. So let’s return to last week’s subject of the deer leaping off the Interstate 91 Route 2 overpass in north Greenfield a couple of weekends back. Reporters tried to get the story from State Police but came up empty when barracks spokesmen went mute and directed the scribes to the mandatory state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs screen for all media questions to bureaucrats. I can’t explain the paranoia. Can you? We’re not dealing with terrorists, assassins or space aliens here, just the simple case of a wild animal committing an unusual act that showed up on a police report. Stonewalled, the scribes were reduced to trading newsroom snipes about suicidal deer. Ha-ha.

I tried to get around the police roadblock last week by mentioning the incident here, hoping to flush out an answer. Sure enough, mission accomplished soon after the column hit the street. My Recorder phone rang quickly after my June 21 arrival. The man on the other end introduced himself as a longtime local golf-course employee, said he thought we had met but he’d rather remain anonymous. He hadn’t seen the deer, his wife had, but he was able to offer scanty detail. The tragedy occurred just before 5:46 a.m. June 17, when his wife placed her call to the police. That done, she called her husband and was so shook up that she admitted herself to the hospital. The story is that she was crossing the bridge and suddenly, out of nowhere, a deer jumped in front of her car and froze to ponder its next move. It looked one way, then another, then directly at the vehicle with an expression of, “Uh-oh. What in Sam Jesus am I doing here?” before catapulting the bridge railing in one gymnastic leap off four coordinated legs. The poor creature was obviously not expecting the 25-foot drop to the 91 pavement. The stunned woman jumped out, hurried around her vehicle and looked down at the prostrate deer lying on the highway below, likely dead or expiring. She doesn’t remember seeing movement.

The story I had heard in the newsroom later that day was that two deer had gone over the railing, which my telephone source admitted was possible even though his wife could remember only one and, though unsure, thought she may even have hit it. An animal lover, she was so distraught that the incident created memory loss and confusion that required inpatient treatment. She appeared to be coming out of her anguish by the time her husband called me at work, but he was vague about the nature of her issues, which is understandable. Who wants to air something like that out in the local paper?

Anyway, her memory was still not clear by the time I spoke to the man, we have not spoken since and I don’t intend to pester him further. He gave me what I wanted. On the surface, it appears to be a simple case of panic by an animal that ventured into a vulnerable place, got claustrophobic in the tight confines of an overpass, and made a knee-jerk decision and instinctive leap. It can happen.

OK, I guess I’ve filled my weekly allotted space. I could have filled a whole page just with the opening thought train, a lubed locomotive itching to lose its brakes down a steep mountain pass. And to think I didn’t even get to that beautiful Montague sky and the conversation it sparked at the Saturday night summer-solstice party I attended; nothing about my friend locked in jail, my reading and meadow musings. I may get to that stuff next week. No promises. Who knows? I may just answer another interesting distant phone call, take another thought-provoking walk, and flail away at this keyboard that may yet be my demise; or, at least, drive me to an autonomous sanctuary where I’m free to ramble.

It’s here, summer solstice, new moon. Beware! Things are haywire. What a loony lead-up to our longest day.

It all started Friday on my daily rounds with the dogs when — Bingo! — back of the hayfield, orchard grass standing tall, bobolinks perched on hardy weed shafts, fluttering, hovering, I saw an uncommon sight, actually not as unusual as it once was. A moose. Not big, but a moose nonetheless, standing tall and alert, looking straight at me. I stopped and backed across the road into the landowner’s driveway, where I parked, got out and walked through the breezeway to the glass kitchen door. Sure enough, both there, man and wife, him seated, her standing at the sink.

“Hey, there’s a moose on the loose in the hayfield!”

“Really?”

“Yeah, wanna see?”

He stood and they hurried outside, him yelling once outside to neighbor Mike, who wasn’t out. They reached the driveway and the lanky quadruped was trotting south. It broke into a scalped hayfield and kept trotting toward a narrow tree-line overlooking a thin riverside swale bordering cropland. I bid the couple adieu and headed back where I started. Hey, maybe it was going to descend into Sunken Meadow, great habitat, wet and getting wetter daily, aided by busy beavers. Beavers and cougars. Seems there’s been a lot of talk about them recently in this space. Not today. Risky. Don’t want some Christian conservative, the worst kind, to accuse me of cheap thrills and hidden messages. I park my truck and take a walk, no moose, no sign of it up top, either. Gone.

A couple of days later I walked into work to start a new week and, not five minutes into my shift, at my desk, a colleague I call Big Boiczek says, “Hey, I saw a moose Friday night on the way home from work, about 10:30, headed for GCC.”

“Interesting. I saw it, too, four hours earlier, a young one, just north of where you saw it.”

A news scribe overheard us, said a moose had been spotted all around Greenfield over the weekend. It was in the Greenfield police report, had somehow crossed 91 and ended up downtown Friday night, by the jail, then in many neighborhoods. Cops gave chase, came up empty. No big deal. Once akin to UFO sightings here, moose are now resident, have lived in territory south of Greenfield where I’ve hunted for many years, sign everywhere, hilltown residents along the periphery routinely spotting antlered bulls, cows with young. Something tells me we’re headed there with cougars, populations quickly expanding into the Midwest and eastward. I believe it’ll happen in my lifetime, unless I meet a sudden, untimely death, the best kind.

Do you remember when moose started showing up in these parts and the experts blamed it on a disorienting parasitic brain-worm? Well, it wasn’t any brain worm, just another historic species reappearing with the forests, like bears and wolves and bobcats and coyotes, all of them coming back with reforestation. I wonder what’s holding back the rattlesnake renaissance. Those venomous serpents were common here from the contact period well into the 19th century and seem to show up everywhere in early New England narrative. Native tribesmen used to adorn themselves with necklaces strung with rattlesnake fangs. That was during the Little Ice Age, when the Northeastern climate was colder than now. I suspect rattlesnakes will soon be back, too, not a pleasant thought for a man who does a lot of off-road, bare-legged hiking with little foot protection.

Back to the moose, though, it wasn’t the only weird weekend occurrence I bumped into. No sir. It got even better Saturday night on the Route 2 overpass in north Greenfield, where, again according to the Greenfield police report, two deer catapulted over the railing and onto Interstate 91. Scribes have had no luck hacking through annoying government-mandated information screens to confirm the tale and get further details, never easy since Gov. Mitt Romney instituted rules restricting media access to state employees. It’s frustrating for reporters chasing an interesting story on deadline or anytime. I learned long ago to ignore the irritating information roadblock. In this case, it was on the police blotter so it must have happened. Given that, and assuming the deer weren’t drunken teenage daredevils, the question is why would they leap off a 25-foot highway overpass. Coyotes, perhaps? Mountain lion? Panic in a dangerous new place, traffic buzzing by? I guess we’ll never know. Worth reporting, though; just the type of story you’ll find in newspapers hamstrung by politicians like Mr. Romney, who may yet be our next president. It wouldn’t surprise me. America deserves a leader who won’t answer questions or allow anyone associated with his government to do so, unless, of course, they have a Master’s in manipulation and deception. But enough of that, back to the animal kingdom, this time critters right around my homestead.

With all the other stuff occurring, why should I be spared at home, where over the weekend we encountered our first kitchen mouse since our April 1997 purchase. Imagine that! More than 15 years in a 200-year-old rural home and never an indoor mouse. That changed late Saturday night when my wife went to the sink and screamed bloody murder, whatever good that does. A trap works much better. But that little issue was insignificant compared to the skunk letting loose around my home for a few days, filling a few rooms with eye-watering stench. What was happening, I can’t say. But my wife called Tuesday night at work and said she had seen it out by the woodshed, fat and healthy, obviously not ill. By Wednesday afternoon, all that was left was faint scent in hot, steamy air out back. Go figure. A litter coming of age? Maybe. Who knows?

Come to think of it, the weekend presolstice weirdness was not limited to the animal kingdom. How about my Tri-Tronics electric dog collars? They’re going goofy, too. I own that are operated by one remote-control. One collar works fine, another won’t turn on, the third won’t turn off. When I put them in the charging cradle, everything seems fine. The charging light glows red and turns to green in a couple of hours when it’s supposedly fully charged. Problem is, when I remove them, they blink green and red a few times, then one keeps blinking reen, telling me it’s on, and the other will not go on even when I try pushing the button with a Phillips screwdriver. The technician I spoke to Monday told me what to do to for a home remedy. I tried. No luck. Under warranty, I mailed the two malfunctioning transmitters to Tri-Tronics’ South Research Loop in Tucson, Ariz., where they’ll be repaired or replaced and returned.

Whew! What a strange six days leading up to the summer solstice, huh? Me a Moon Child, no less. Maybe I should have just been patient and waited for the weirdness to fade. Either that or perhaps I should have thrown both of those transmitters off the Route 2 overpass and taken a flying leap along with them.

Nah. Just kidding. I wouldn’t miss this next full moon for anything. A birthday moon. Promising. It should be intense.

Nice

Pancho was a bandit boys

His horse was fast as polished steel

Wore his gun outside his pants

For all the honest world to feel.

Pancho met his match you know

On the desert down in Mexico

Nobody heard his dying words

Ah, but that’s the way it goes.

“Pancho and Lefty”

Townes Van Zandt

Mysteries everywhere — in your face and faraway. They pop into your path and vanish like scent in a windstorm. Time to ponder.

Knut Hamsun’s “Mysteries” comes to mind. Three or four times I have read it. Not recently. A fierce foe of anything average and conventional, Hamsun often explores love, loss and human frailties: joys, pains, idle thoughts, some poignant, others haunting. More than anything else, Hamsun seemed to struggle with women, no relief. He likely never solved the dilemma, a recurring caress-and-dagger theme in his work. His dissection of soul digs deep, exposing subliminal artifice in relationships, bare as raw lust and jealousy, the hatred, inner torment it can unleash. He always relates it all back to nature, the big picture, larger than man, bigger than life, no younger.

So what is it, you may ask, that tangles me into this bizarre labyrinth of morning reflection? Nothing special. Just a basic walk coupled with recent observations, occurrences. Stuff like the dwarf deer that captured my fancy and that of a friend who called, was equally perplexed by the same peculiar animal; also does and fawns; a happenstance meeting with an old friend of my late son’s down in fragrant Sunken Meadow, the sweetness overwhelming, a hidden place where I didn’t expect to find him; lastly, reading, putting it together. Mysteries, all intriguing, all connected, all meaning something; what, I cannot say for sure, except that trying to figure it out makes life interesting for those of us who like to wander and ponder. But, no, I’m not here to hang any Hamsunesque female issues out on the clothesline. I have none. But enough of that, onto the task at hand.

Let’s begin with the young man, friend of my son, fishing for trout with his two 30ish Pennsylvania pals, a handsome trio, the devil in their eyes. Fishing the Green River, one of them caught a fat 18-inch rainbow pictured on his cell phone. He released it back into the stream, free to live another day, give a different angler splashy, acrobatic thrills. I didn’t immediately recognize the first fella I spoke to, hard-pack of Viceroys cupped in his right hand. He knew me. I didn’t hear him say, “Hi, Gary.” My wife did. He identified himself to her. I remembered him well, got talking about the river, fishing, the status of Green River brown trout, then parted. His eyes told me he wanted to say something about Gary. He didn’t. My wife didn’t spare me a couple of weeks ago, out of the clear blue, no warning, Doc Watson pickin’ and grinnin’, pointed Mount Ascutney on the Vermont horizon.

“Why did they take him from us?” she gasped.

“Why did who take him?”

Pause.

“Whoever.”

A perfect answer for me; soothing, too, for her grieving soul. Why dwell on sadness? That’s my philosophy. But, yes, I do often think of him, then let it go like powder in the breeze by capturing a new thought that sets me free as that liberated rainbow. The Buddhists or Taoists or one of those Far Eastern religions compare life to a stream, ebbing and flowing, swirling and foaming, always progressing. I understand, have felt it often, learned to ride ebullient currents, gather strength in eddies, even once survived a disorienting death spiral in turbulent spring waters under the falls at a now-forbidden gorge. Lucky, I guess. Tell me I’m crazy. Wouldn’t be the first time. Only words. Crazy like a fox, a cunning cougar.

Whoa!

The deer, that little Memorial-Day-Weekend deer in the tall neighborhood hayfield. I first heard about it from a colleague who had chased it from his tender young lettuce patch. The man, working, threw dirtballs to chase it, too tame, off. The next day, his uncle encountered it near the greenhouses and shooed it away. A day later, at the start of a noontime trip to Bardwells Ferry and Conway, I saw it, too large for this year’s fawn, too small for last year’s. My buddy called later in the day, ice cubes clinking. He was confused, wanted to chat. He had seen it in the same field I had, closer to the road. He stopped to scare it back from the road, said it acted tame, no fear. A half-hour earlier, atop the hill, he had seen a similar deer, same size, no spots, never before had seen anything like it in May. An orphaned early birth? Maybe. Did I have any theories? Yeah, nature’s mysteries. What else can I say?

I have since seen two does with spring lambs, not to mention many tiny fawn tracks following the paths I’ve cut through chest-high orchard grass, timothy seed-heads finally formed. The deer must be enjoying the thick, sumptuous layer of clover underneath. These fawns look like they should, tiny and spotted, staying close to the mother. My brother-in-law in Freedom, Maine, called to say he’s already observed twin fawns nursing out the bay window of his gentleman’s farm. Does it get any better?

As for reading, well, I’m still mired in the final French & Indian War, focused on that wedge-shaped theater between the Hudson and Mohawk valleys. I blew through a four-volume study on Rogers’ Rangers, then a Jeffery, Lord Amherst, biography, now a biography of Sir William Johnson, a white man with uncanny sway over the fierce Five Nations tribesmen and their seductive women. What I find most interesting about buckskinned frontiersmen like Rogers and Johnson is their rugged independence and total disrespect for authority, particularly incompetent British regulars giving orders, men driven by ego and petty jealousies instead of sound judgment and strategy. Then you read something like Michael Hastings’ “The Last Prisoner of War” in the new Rolling Stone and realize how history keeps repeating itself. Cantankerous scribe Ambrose Bierce, himself a decorated Civil War veteran, said 100 years ago that some of our bravest, wisest warriors die by firing squad, their own. Now this: Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl, a pathetic 23-year-old Idahoan prisoner of the Taliban; he may yet meet a gruesome death for obeying his conscience. I read his tale, felt sad, admired his courage. Others are screaming “Traitor!” Bierce knew the game, hated it.

It’s funny. You don’t have to wonder how petty, incompetent officers gain rank. The mystery is how they maintain it. If seeking the truth, turn to artists, study their books, their paintings, their songs. Ridiculed as weak and soft by reactionary politicians and haughty newspaper editors, their work exhales wisdom under clear, cold skies.

I suppose some folks are born to answer Yes, sir!, wear robes at the altar, earn Eagle badges, and punch clocks all the way to the customer-service-booth crown, where their large color photo hangs in a faux-walnut frame over shiny, polished floors. Others resist authority, cut their own trail and may or may not find success. These days, the odds are against them. They’re more apt to find suffering, may even perish in stinking, shallow shame kicked upon them by wing-tipped guardians of freedom, liberty, justice and a thing called status quo.

No mystery there, ma’am, threadbare fact.